[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Every week, Nathan Bush from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that
Nathan Bush: you need to know to keep you
[Voiceover]: at the top of your game and of course, keep your customers adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to a very special midweek episode of Add to Cart. What a treat. My name is Nathan Bush and today I want to give you guys a sneak peek on some of the content from our upcoming E Commerce accelerator which commences on the 21st of March. Today you're going to hear the answers to a question that I posed to 10 leaders in E commerce who I have huge admiration and respect for. And they range from leaders to retailers to agency folk to consultants to journalists to tech people. Some of them have even been on ADD to CART before. You'll recognize their voices. I wanted them to answer one simple question for our accelerator students. What excites you most about E commerce in the next five years? Quite the question, hey, considering the last couple of years. Now, as a bit of context, we've created the E Commerce Accelerator course at E Suite to teach the foundations of e commerce across strategy, marketing, technology, analytics, finance, supply chain and more. It's a 10 week program done 100% remote and designed to fit around work, life and just general chaos. Our aim is to help upskill those who are at the start of their e commerce journey or upskill those in retail who want to know more about E commerce. And we want to help retail businesses build internal pipelines of e commerce talent. It's not good enough to go to market every time you need to bring e commerce talent in. We want to develop those pipelines internally. So what you're going to hear today is one of seven Industry Voices videos which our students will have access to throughout the course. As well as these videos, There will be 102 hour live lessons and over 20 cheat sheets and templates, a load of curated ecommerce resources and a community to connect with your peers. And I think that's the most exciting part because you never know where those connections will lead. We're also lucky enough to partner with Shopify for some hands on experience with the platform and you'll leave with your entry level Google Analytics certification. So it's been a fun journey putting all this learning material together and you know, to be honest, I forgot how much there was to cover when you're at the start of your E commerce journey. So let's get into it. Here is the first of our industry voices video. In order of appearance, you're going to hear the following E commerce leaders answer the question of what excites you most about E Commerce in the next five years. We have Angus McDonald, CEO of Barbecues Galore. Emily Hayden, my business partner in crime at E Suite. Anthony Napper, CEO and co founder of Ozhair and Beauty. Ben Anderson, head of E Commerce at Accent Group. Matt Newell, partner and CEO at the General Store. Kate Collinson, E Commerce consultant and growth marketer. Jason Andrew, co founder and director at SBO Natalie Hintzer, head of e commerce and marketing at Mr. Poolman. Jo Ann Huey Miller Nicole, managing editor at InsideRetail. And lastly, Reece Verner, head of partnerships at Shopify Asia Pacific. Now, obviously you have heard from some of these people before. We've heard from Anthony, we've heard from Matt, Kate, Jason, Nat and Reece. Here's their answer to the question. What excites me most about E Commerce
Natalie Hintzer: for the next five years is just how quickly the market is changing and the way that new technologies are just transforming the way that customers can engage with their brands of choice.
Nathan Bush: And I think there's going to be
Natalie Hintzer: a polarization of retail where those that are really experimental and really embrace those opportunities will do increasingly well and build
Nathan Bush: really strong, robust tribal brands as opposed
Natalie Hintzer: to those that may fall behind. But it's a pretty exciting time all up and actually creates lots of opportunity as customers think differently about the way they want to shop.
[Voiceover]: The thing that excites me the most about E Commerce over the next five years is that we are seeing this rapid acceleration of so many technologies that we have been talking about implementing and arming and about over so many years. And now the time is now this trajectory is coming.
Ben Anderson: The thing that excites me the most about E Commerce over the next five years is there is so much juice left to squeeze. Where other industries, I wouldn't say they tapped out, but there's just not as much juice in there. And with E commerce breeding, you know, a lot of retail reports, a lot of Australians still aren't using E Commerce. Covid's obviously accelerated that, but even so, a lot more opportunity and now's the time to really get into it.
Natalie Hintzer: I think there's really a changing of the guard in terms of where retail has been in traditional businesses into kind of now a data led and a customer led experience. We have so many touch points across our sites, we have so much enriched data that you don't necessarily get it in retail environment, we can start to make much, much better decisions around what's best for the customer. How do we market to a customer, how do we actually give the customer a much, much better and richer experience? I also think that what's really exciting is the evolution of digital E. Com. That whole space is really growing with what we've kind of seen as the growth of Gen Z really because you look at their disposable income, they're now native with technology and mobile phones. So they're basically going straight to your mobile phone, looking at it and going right, where do I want to start my shopping journey if I want to investigate products, if they want to look for services, whatever it might be. So with that, you can actually see now the disposable incomes increase, which means that online shopping is only ever going to continue to increase.
Ben Anderson: So what excites me about E commerce for the next five years is just how like integrated it's going to be. I think historically we've thought about it as these two separate things, the sort of online retail and physical retail. But going forward I think that'll just be a complete blur. We'll stop referring to it as a separate thing. It'll be the thing. And really, I think consumers are so far ahead of retailers on this. I think the tragedy here is that retailers feel separated out. But going forward that will end and it'll all be unified and integrated and a smoother process for our customers. So I think that's exciting. There's one other thing that I think is exciting, which is this move the early signs towards a metaverse. So I think in the next five years, imagining what virtual reality could look like for commerce could be really, really interesting. That we could, you know, shopping for sneakers could involve flying through forests and finding them behind waterfalls and meeting celebrities and going to dance parties and all these sorts of things. So I mean, there's a whole other dimension literally that could be opened up. And I think in the next five years we'll make some pretty big strides towards that.
[Voiceover]: The technology itself is just developing so quickly that I can't even tell you what the industry might even look like in another five years time. Which personally for me, on one hand it's hard to plan or plan out your career for the next five years. But on the other hand, I couldn't even tell you what kinds of jobs might be out there in the future in E commerce. And I find that really exciting.
Natalie Hintzer: I think most of all that's really exciting for me is there is this new Platform with talent. So traditionally I didn't have an E commerce background. I came from finance and I moved into E commerce. But now there are people and there's courses and there's ways to learn. So the talent that we're bringing into this field is much smarter than me. They're much more adapt, they know technology much better than me. So I feel like the acceleration that we're going to get in this space is much, much faster than we've had in the last two years, which for me is super exciting.
Jason Andrew: What I love about ecommerce currently is just there's so many different niches of niches of niches, how you want to call it, of different folks just selling random things on the Internet. And I love it. We come across a new brand every other day and it's so odd that, you know, to give you a great story, like we have a client that sells breast pumps online and you know, ask. 18 months ago I would have thought breast pumps is such a weird and niche thing to sell. But just two weeks ago I bought a breast pump for my, for my wife from that same company and I realized that there is an enormous market for that. So I think it's. Yeah, it's just all these weird, wonderful brands selling these niche bits of bits of product on the Internet. It's just going to continue as demand increases for that.
Speaker F: So with this pandemic, it's really changing the way consumers shop. Taking away bricks and mortar even more, moving it to online. And this forces our hand at moving faster and harder to live up to those customer experience expectations. What I really like about addressing marketing in this space is referring to customer satisfaction as a KPI and I feel like that's something that we've never put an onus on before. Performance metrics. Performance metrics. But actually looking at that customer satisfaction as they move through the journey and therefore placing more of an onus on marketers than ever before. It's not so much just publishing a message anymore, it's actually being in control of that end to end experience with the consumer, that entire customer experience. I think that's where I'm most excited to see this space just really accelerate and it'll show who's got their fingers on the pulse because they're going to have to quickly adapt to what consumers want.
[Voiceover]: If you look back at Covid, obviously that really pushed retailers to be very innovative and very creative and that's. It doesn't matter whether they were a traditional physical retailer that was just very slow on the uptake in terms of online retail or if they were already on the ball and they were pure play retailers, obviously businesses found a lot of new ways to connect with customers through things like livestream, virtual events, social. If you think about it, it's only been 18 months since COVID hit and those are the sort of things that are now almost part of the normal e commerce landscape now. If you're a fashion retailer and you don't have live stream or a virtual event or live chat like what are you doing? That is part of the new normal now and I think that is so exciting. At Inside Retail we obviously have retail awards each year and for the last retailer awards that we had that the standard in e commerce was just so high. I want to know what's the next normal, like what is going to be the epitome of exceptional e commerce in the future. So I think that's super exciting. Do you know what I mean? I think that's just amazing to see what will happen.
Nathan Bush: We're really seeing a lot of traditional businesses invest heavily in the digital side but but also we're going to start seeing the digitally native businesses invest in the traditional side. So it's seeing these two different businesses attack the same problem but from different angles. And I think that's going to be super exciting to watch unfold over the next five years. And the end goal is just to give the customer the best way to buy what they want to buy, wherever, whenever. I love that we've got such a diverse group of e commerce experts here. Each have their own, own unique perspective on where the world of e commerce is heading. And I love kicking off the accelerator with this video because it shows all the different directions and opportunities there are in an e commerce career. I mean, just because you are in e commerce doesn't mean you have to be an e commerce manager or start your own e commerce business. There are so many pathways and opportunities in e commerce and I think you know the answers you got there should be show all the different directions you can take. Now if you're interested in joining us on March 21st, head on over to esweettalent.com to register. The course is $1,950 per student but add to CART. Listeners can get $200 off by using the code ADD to CART all one word. So that's esweettalent.com au accelerator and use the code addt add to cart for $200 off. We start on March 21, just over a week away. It's coming around very soon, and we're super excited for it. Now, if you think the accelerator isn't for you, you're a bit more advanced than that. And you maybe are, because you're listening to ADD to CART regularly, but you think it could be great for your team and you want to develop an internal pipeline of e commerce talent. Drop me a note. We can supply a custom quote for a team cohort and and we have a few cohorts from some of the best retailers in the business already going through. But if you have a team of five or more students, we'll create a custom quote for you. Email us@accelerator suitetalent.com and we'll get back to you with your special pricing straight away. All right, that's it for me for our special Wednesday episode. We'll see you again on Friday for the checkout episode. And we have the fabulous Sam Penny from Artisans Bend. You might remember him as the lunatic who swam the coldest English Channel. No doubt he's got some fantastic answers for us. Stay tuned. And then we'll be back to regular scheduling.
